Best restaurant email marketing strategies for your restaurant

Rae Steinbach

Best restaurant email marketing strategies for your restaurant

Rae Steinbach, Guest WriterMay 11, 2018

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Restaurant email marketing

It’s easy to see that the restaurant industry is a highly competitive market. Failure rates in the first five years for new businesses are notoriously high. Over a million restaurants operate in the US, and the overwhelming majority are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. In order to succeed, marketing efforts need to keep up with today’s digital world to reach new and returning customers. Read this blog if you are just getting started with restaurant marketing.

Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to maintain and grow relationships with the dining public. In terms of returns-on-investment, email marketing outpaces all other forms of marketing while having the added benefit of reaching every demographic one could want.

Even better for small businesses, email levels the advertising playing field by making it easy to reach more customers at a lower cost. When launching your marketing campaign, it’s especially important to leverage tools like an email checker to make sure your message is reaching your audience.

Getting Started With Restaurant Email MarketingEmails are the best and fastest way to reach your customers. What’s not to like about having full control of your message in a cost-effective way? By creating a campaign that allows you to be ‘in front of your customers’ daily, weekly, or monthly creates trust and brand identity. To ensure transparency, make sure you are able to hold up your end of the deal when offering specials or freebies to your customers.

To help you get started, we put together some tips and tricks for your restaurant email marketing strategy:

A mobile-friendly email is an email that displays optimally between phones and desktops. The best place to start with mobile optimization is with a responsive website design. A responsive web design allows mobile users to have the same experience as desktop browsers. According to a study by Smart Insights, emails sent by restaurants have a 63% open rate from mobile phones. Making your emails mobile friendly is no longer a nice thing to have; its a must. More and more Americans are spending time on their phones. In fact, Americans spent an average of 10 hours per day to screen time in 2016—and it’s only growing. If your emails are not mobile friendly, you are missing out on engaging your audience and driving results.

It’s important to optimize your emails for phones as well. Here are some essentials tips for keeping your emails more mobile friendly:

Use a single column template

Using simple email templates is generally best practice due to the limited amount of space you have on a phone. This keeps the email clean and user-friendly. You don’t want your customers to struggle with zooming in and out trying to read the email.

Write creative, but simple subject lines

This is the headline of your email. It must capture attention, incentivizing your customers to open it. Optimizing your subject lines by device type is also another email marketing best practice. This helps make the email more readable and clean on those devices.

Include CTAs

Tell your customers exactly what to do with a call-to-action button somewhere in the email. Keep it simple too, for example, ‘RSVP now’ or ‘Get Coupon’.

Test emails on different devices

Before sending your email out, make sure to test the email on multiple devices to make sure it works on iPhones, Androids, etc.

Choose an Email Service Provider

If manually taking on the email strategy sounds like a big effort, then invest in an email service provider to take care of the busy work. An email service provider (ESP) takes care of the online service and management side of sending emails to a broad audience. An ESP can recommend/provide email templates, databases for emails, automated email scheduling, analytic tools for reviewing success, and more advantages.

Business owners do not have to worry about the programming and digital aspects of working in the online world. Instead, an ESP allows them to focus on their design and content, leaving the technical details to professionals. Some ESPs, like Fishbowl and Bridg, specialize in restaurants with features specifically geared toward the industry.

Collect Emails From Customers

Logically, you need emails to target your campaign. While many businesses rely on the internet to find clients, as restaurant professionals, you have a unique opportunity of meeting your customers in person as well.

The best place to solicit emails is in your restaurant itself. Your customers are on-site, have experienced your food and services, and are predisposed to want to come back.

Offering a way to personally contact them while they are “hot leads” is an ideal scenario. You can ask for emails without being pushy by:

including a comment card with the check that has space for email addresses;

leaving a tasteful sign-up form near your hosting station or waiting area;

printing your website address on the receipt with an email sign-up reminder;

offering a raffle draw where customers drop their email address in a handy bowl.

Online, you can collect addresses through sign-up forms on your website. This format can be especially successful if you offer an incentive like a dining coupon.

If you use services like Groupon or OpenTable, make sure to include a link to your website in your listing so that customers can take the next step to reaching that email sign-up.

Learn Email Campaign Basics

Marketing emails fall into three general categories: confirmation, promotional, and relational. You should have email content ready to go when people sign-up. Schedule it to send at regular intervals, and fill it with content that will prompt someone to respond or make a reservation.

Confirmation: As soon as someone provides an email address, you should have a sincere, welcoming email to send. The email will remind recipients who you are, thank them for signing up, and encourage them to return to your restaurant.

Promotional: Promotional emails will center around specific events and ideas. They can include value coupons, refer-a-friend offers, or invites to special events. You can keep people up to date on new menu items, tasting menus, live music if you have it, or any other information intended to entice the customer to return.

Relational: Dining out is a social activity, and customers love to build a personal relationship with the places they frequent. Relational emails take a more informational approach, like telling the story of how your restaurant came to be. It can also be used to introduce new and existing staff, educate clients on food topics like wine tasting or how to create a dish, or simply wish people a healthy celebration on an upcoming holiday.

Personalize Your Messages

Each customer is unique, therefore each email needs to be unique! Segmenting your list according to the demographics of your customers is the first step in email personalization. Grouping your contacts by gender, age, location, purchase history or any other information you have can allow you to send emails that are more in-tune to your customer’s needs.

Does this seem like more work for you? It doesn’t have to be! Email service providers usually have features to automate personalization for you. If you are looking to save time, then automation is a must. These features can even allow you to set up triggers so that emails that are pre-made can be sent to customers that meet a certain condition. The next time you have a special to promote, make your messaging appealing through demographics and personalization.

Integrate your social media strategy

Even though social media and emails are different platforms, they can still work together to form a great strategy. Social media is a great tool to expand reach and build up your brand. The audience and traffic you receive on social media can also build your email list. You can also post your email sign-up on different platforms in a variety of ways. For example, you can create a call-to-action on your Facebook page which adds a sign-up form on your page.

This strategy also works vice-versa. Let your email subscribers know to follow your restaurant’s Instagram or Facebook page. It’s easy to add social media buttons in your emails that lead your customers to your various pages. Encourage your email subscribers to check out your social media platforms to gain more traffic and visibility.

Encourage Feedback

It’s important to let your customers have direct access to your restaurant in regards to questions and feedback. Adding survey’s in your emails can be a great way to get insights on what customers think of your restaurant. When creating your own feedback email, stick to simple designs so that users can easily click the call-to-action button and fill out the survey.

The insights that you collect can also make for great reviews to post on your restaurant’s website or other review platforms. Online reviews can help with brand trust and beat out the competition. You could send an email after someone purchases something from your restaurant asking for a review of their experience. You’d be surprised by how often customers are willing to provide their feedback; positive and negative.

Learn and Experiment with Restaurant Marketing CampaignsWith the basic strategy under your belt, you can develop an email campaign suited to your particular needs and customers. Keep track of how people respond with email open rates, successful responses, and various feedback by learning how to use your ESP analytics data.

Over time, you will become an expert at targeting your customers to your best advantage and start to reap the cost-effective benefits of hitting the “send” button. For more restaurant marketing ideas, check out this blog.

If you are interested in learning more about restaurant technologies that can improve your restaurant operations, sign up for a free 30-day trial with Deputy below:

Important Notice The information contained in this article is general in nature and you should consider whether the information is appropriate to your needs. Legal and other matters referred to in this article are of a general nature only and are based on Deputy's interpretation of laws existing at the time and should not be relied on in place of professional advice. Deputy is not responsible for the content of any site owned by a third party that may be linked to this article and no warranty is made by us concerning the suitability, accuracy or timeliness of the content of any site that may be linked to this article. Deputy disclaims all liability (except for any liability which by law cannot be excluded) for any error, inaccuracy, or omission from the information contained in this article and any loss or damage suffered by any person directly or indirectly through relying on this information.

POSTED ON

May 11, 2018

Business

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rae Steinbach Rae is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing (of course).